


A Simple Trick

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Doctor Who (2005), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Daemons, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-12
Updated: 2010-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-01 20:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/360852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They play a game with the fourth psychiatrist. [daemon fusion AU.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Simple Trick

**Author's Note:**

> Canon compliant with the fifth season only.
> 
> Written for a meme I did ages ago, where I had people give me a character and I would a ficlet about them and their daemon. 
> 
> mccarthyism asked for Amy Pond.

-

 

When she was six years old, her mother bent to kiss her cheek on her way out the door. Her father pulled his knit cap down on his forehead and said, "we'll be back in five minutes."

Amy said okay, and flipped the page of her picture book. Balthazar didn't even get down from the couch to say good-bye to her parents' daemons.

 

-

 

They play a little game with psychiatrist number four.

Their first meeting, Balthazar takes the shape of a rangy tabby cat, matted ginger fur complete with exaggerated half-moon spectacles around his eyes (they thought this was a rather clever touch, although to be honest it had more to do with the Harry Potter craze they were going through,) and he stands as far away from the psychiatrist's wombat daemon as the room will allow. All in all, the psychiatrist only looks at Balthazar long enough to register his recalcitrance, his mangy fur, and his shape before she's jumped to all the conclusions she's needed to jump to and turns instead to Amy.

So for every visit after that, Balthazar changes a little bit: a hands-width bigger here, stripes coalescing into rosettes there, fur getting softer and longer, yellow eyes instead of green. Just minor things, wondering how long it'll take the doctor to notice. He still keeps far out of reach of the wombat daemon, although this is more a hindbrain instinct by now than it is purposeful.

That's one visit every other week for six months before she finally clues in: she puts her clipboard down, and stares hard at Balthazar over the rims of her sleek, modern glasses (Amy's formulated a theory that she bought them off the reading glasses rack at Tesco; with the way she always looks over them, they can't actually be real.) He's almost fully clouded leopard today, skulking behind Amy's chair, tail twitching in time to the ticks of the wall clock.

She points at him with the cap of her pen. "Is he ..." she starts.

Amy smirks.

And that's the end of psychiatrist number four.

 

-

 

At fifteen, Amy had ducked into the last stall in the lady's restroom to eat her lunch. Rory might want to eat with her, and Jeff too, but she didn't want to see either of their pasty faces today.

"You're just going to have to pretend," she tells Balthazar, finally, licking Vegemite straight off her plastic knife with gruff determination. She hates _everybody._

At the suggestion, he flicks between shapes, rapid-fire like just thinking about it is going to get him stuck: piglet to peacock to polecat, and he leaps up on Amy's knee, looking agitated. She rubs her thumb at the soft fur underneath his chin. "But I'm not _ready,_ Amy."

"I know," she says, because she _does._ "But if you're not going to actually just _pick_ something, we're going to have to tell people you did."

"I don't see why it matters."

"Even the boys have all picked something by now --"

"Hezekial's daemon is a lemming! I don't think that counts."

"-- and we're the only ones in our whole year who haven't _grown up!"_

"Oh, Amy, no," goes Balthazar with sudden understanding, planting his paws on her chest and licking at her cheeks, which are wet, somehow, without her having noticed. The Vegemite is gummy on her tongue. "No, it's not like that. It's not that I don't want to settle ... it's just -- it's just, everything feels wrong."

"I know," Amy sobs, because she does.

 

-

 

If anything, the relief on her aunt's face when she came home and slammed her schoolbooks on the table and said, "Balthazar's decided" just proves her point.

"Oh, well, all right then," Aunt Charlotte goes in her disgustingly thorough English voice. And then, "and unroll the hem of your skirt, Amy, dear, having it hiked up that far makes you look totty."

Vicious, Amy goes, "no one even _says_ that anymore," which right then seems sufficiently witty and cutting. She tugs her tie loose and doesn't even resist stomping up the stairs and slamming her bedroom door, it's been that kind of day. Immediately, Balthazar hops up onto the bedspread next to her, first landing as an ocelet, then becoming an otter, and finally a tiny oriole, fluttering up to her shoulder to press close to her cheek. She can feel him panting, like staying in one shape is _exhausting._

The telephone rings; when she was nine, some well-meaning relative gave her a Bedazzler kit, so there are cheap plastic rhinestones stuck all over the phone on her bedside table, half lost underneath a coffee mug and bottles of vitamins and clay figures of her and the Raggedy Doctor. She picks it up, because, please, like it's going to be for Aunt Charlotte.

"Amy?" Rory's voice says, going high enough to crack. He clears his throat and waits until she affirms before rushing on, "Jillian at the post office said Balthazar picked something!"

Amy twines the phone cord around the end of her finger. Lying isn't hard. "Yes."

Rory breathes in, sharp. "That's fantastic! B-bloody -- _fantastic!"_ Rory's daemon hadn't ever been as enamored of change as Balthazar was: she'd stick with forms for weeks at a time, and when they were playing, she'd always match up to whatever Balthazar wanted to be. But when they were thirteen, Rory came to first period with Estrella tagging along slowly, almost reluctantly, at his heels.

"The hell?" Amy had managed, too surprised to be tactful.

Rory's blush spread to the rest of his face. "A penguin. A -- an emperor penguin. She's ... I don't think she's going to change again, Amy."

"She's ridiculous."

"She's beautiful," Balthazar countered immediately, leaping down from Amy's lap to sniff curiously at Estrella's sleek feathers. Amy felt a tug low under her breastbone, and then there were two large penguins standing there between their desks. Rory gave them a grateful smile, and things were okay again after that.

Amy's still right, though -- she is kind of ridiculous, and she's especially awkward-looking when she has to run (if Rory had ever been interested in trying out for any sport except maybe swimming, that put an end to _that_ idea.) But she fits Rory; stodgy and solid and funny-looking and still the most loyal caretaker a person could ask for. Rory's thinking about going into medicine. Amy can't even be upset at the way all her fairy-tales are kind of falling apart, because it's right.

"I'm coming over," Rory says now. In the background, she hears Estrella give an excited bleat.

Balthazar fluffs his feathers. "Do you think we can keep lying to Rory?" he asks her when she hangs up.

"It's just pretending," Amy answers, picking up one of the clay Doctor figures. It's cold and heavy in her hands. "We've always been good at pretending with Rory."

 

-

 

When she was seven, she didn't get a very good look at the strange man's daemon when he came climbing out of the swimming pool that was in the library. Her memories are trying to fool her, saying that maybe he didn't have one, but that's ridiculous, because everybody has a daemon. Only corpses don't.

When she's nineteen, a man breaks into her house and pounds at her blank walls and she hits him over the head with a cricket bat, so hard that he drops like a stone. But what freaks her out is that his daemon still stands -- human consciousness and daemon consciousness are linked; when one sleeps, the other sleeps, when one is unconscious, the other is unconscious. But the man's wolf daemon comes up the last few stairs, moving loose and strangely disjointed, like she's not really a wolf but just pretending at one without having a good idea of what, exactly, they do. She stops at the landing but doesn't come any closer, nor does she bare her teeth or snarl or do anything but watch patiently as Amy drags the intruder across the rug, heart pounding, and handcuffs him to the radiator. Balthazar plants himself between her and the wolf daemon, full on leopard with his hackles raised, but the daemon just looks at him.

Her eyes are blue. Full on blue; no pupil, no iris, just blank, thorough blue.

"Are you like an alien or something?" Amy asks the Doctor, two years later, when he casually just pops in the morning before her wedding. 

"Yup," he answers, like it's no big deal.

"And your daemon ..."

The Doctor smiles at her sideways. "Isn't a daemon the way you'd think of one, but she's still my soul. She's the TARDIS." He puts a hand on the side of the blue box, nothing less than absolutely enamored.

Her real name, in whatever the Doctor's tongue is, is something Amy doesn't ever have a prayer of pronouncing ("nobody else could, don't worry about," the Doctor dismissed it with a flick of his hand across his nose,) so mostly she and Balthazar just wind up calling her Tea, not like the drink, but tee-uh.

"Sounds fairytale," she remarks, blinking her blue, blue, blue eyes.

After the adventure with Churchill and the London Blitz, they all but dance back into the TARDIS, giddy with it. Tea leaps up onto the platform surrounding the console, Balthazar matched up beside her, flicking from first a goose, then a gazelle, through a greyhound before he settles as a brindled wolf, same size and shape as Tea. They look good together like that, Amy thinks, and as she does, Balthazar leans into Tea with a slow wag of his tail, nosing at her cheek.

Amy slows, gripping the stair rail at the sensation.

"Are you going to ..." she starts, and can't finish. Balthazar immediately comes back to her, bumping reassuringly up against her leg.

"This isn't right, either, Amy," he says finally, and winds around her to talk to the Doctor. "We always thought that we'd never settle because we were always just waiting for you to come back. But you're here, and we're with you, and everything is wonderful. What's missing?"

 

-

 

There's a Roman soldier at Stonehenge whose daemon is grey and wrong, a little fuzzy around the edges like an overhead slide just out of focus. Balthazar, who keeps the wolf shape most often these days, will drift near her only to veer sharply away, like he's been spooked, coming around to lean against Amy's hip. The soldier's name is Rory, and Amy thinks he's not that bad-looking, for an unwashed invader who's probably about to get vaporized by one of the dozen spaceships floating up in the black sky.

The soldier's name is Rory, and his head is full of things that Amy doesn't remember: Leadworth and the Raggedy Doctor and kissing sloppily under the mistletoe for the first time when they were fifteen (him and Amy, not him and the Doctor, oh god,) only to find the picture on Facebook the next day by someone he didn't even remember being there. He's Rory Williams, Roman soldier from 120 CE, and he has an emperor penguin daemon named Estrella in an army where everybody has hounds and fierce birds of prey.

When he shoots Amy Pond, Balthazar makes this sound that he will never forget for as long as he lives (1, 890 years, give or take several dozen that haven't been written yet) and then vanishes, a small puff of golden dust carried away on the wind like the scattering of dandelion seeds, and Rory catches Amy's corpse as it falls against him, Estrella so see-through she has little more substance than film, and the night is quiet. Absolutely quiet.

 

-

 

Inside the Pandorica, she's pale and still, too small and slightly skewed even as she's strapped in. Blood sluggishly drips from her gunshot wound; her shirt and skirt are already soaked through.

"Amy Pond," the Doctor whispers, brushing her hair back and pressing a kiss there to her temple. "The Girl Who Waited. You've waited long enough."

Another kiss to the other temple. He brings his hands to his mouth with a whisper, a breath of time and matter and possibly magic, and stoops down, opening his palms so that Balthazar tips into her lap, small and deeply asleep, curling instinctively against her hip. He's a trapdoor spider, the creature that waits longest and most patiently, furry legs tucked up close to his body.

The Doctor steps down from the dais, Rory coming immediately to his side, and the Pandorica seals tight without fanfare.

 

-

 

After, after, after.

After everything, after the stars ignite again, after an Egyptian goddess tears Amy's wedding dress and gets punched in the face for her trouble, Rory strokes a hand down the slope of her spine as they're walking and says quietly, "Amy..."

She lost her veil three gnomes and two explosions ago, but her hair is still wild and vaguely clinging to their ringlet shapes, and she turns to him, ever smiling, hiking the bodice of her dress back up in a hindbrain protection of her modesty. She touches a hand to his cheek.

"Amy," Estrella says when Rory fumbles over the words. "Amy, I think it's ..." and she trails off, too.

Amy seems to get it, because she reaches up to her shoulder to cup Balthazar in her hands. He's still in the trapdoor spider shape; to her parents, to her aunt, to people who aren't Rory and the Doctor, he's always been a spider, quiet and still and waiting. He fixes his many eyes up at them, and in her peripheral, Amy notices that the Doctor's stopped his merry, saved-the-world hop-skip-run and has trailed back to them, watching quietly.

"Yeah, you're right," she says, and sets Balthazar down on the grass.

There's a shift, and suddenly it's like those days when her hair's fallen right around her shoulders, when she feels after a good stretch and run, when she knows exactly what to say in an argument or when she makes the Doctor laugh or when Rory looks at her like he can't see anyone else. Suddenly, she feels exactly like the girl who, once upon a time, a whole other universe revolved around.

"Amelia," Balthazar says, arching up against her hand. He's nothing fantastical in the end, nothing more than what he is: a cat, ginger tabby fur and even the half-moon spectacles around his eyes, because Amy never did shake her love of Harry Potter (especially once Daniel Radcliffe got so delicious-looking.) Nothing more or less than the center of her universe.

Amy breathes out, because the longest wait is over.

 

 

-  
fin

**Author's Note:**

> Helpful Google Image reference: [a lemming](http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/Lemming%20II.jpg); [a trapdoor spider](http://www.insectidentification.org/imgs/insects/trapdoor-spider.jpg)


End file.
